The Chase

  “I don’t know anything about lighting,” Joe said, “but I made sure there were some tall light stands placed throughout the house at the same height and angle as Carter’s security cameras. I hid tiny cameras of my own on the stands and filmed the empty rooms. When Kate and Nick slip into the theater, I’m going to replace the video feed from Carter’s surveillance cameras with a continuous loop of the footage I shot of the empty room.”

  “Very clever,” Boyd said.

  “And that’s not the only reason we have our own cameras everywhere,” Nick said. “Joe is going to be our guardian angel. He’ll be in the trailer watching everything that’s happening on all the cameras and will alert us if there’s any trouble.”

  Boyd looked at Joe. “You’ll have to tell me where the cameras are so I can make sure they get my best angle.”

  Kate groaned. “The only cameras you have to worry about are the ones filming the show.”

  “Au contraire,” Boyd said. “An actor has to be constantly aware of his audience, whether they are in the front row or the cheap seats, if he is going to give a convincing performance.”

  “Carter is the only one who has to be convinced,” Kate said.

  “And the guards watching on the security cameras,” Boyd said. “If they don’t believe my performance, then the entire show fails.”

  “We’ll make sure you know where all the cameras are,” Nick said to Boyd. “Just don’t look into them.”

  “You’re talking to a professional,” Boyd said.

  Joe handed Kate, Nick, and Boyd flesh-colored devices that looked like tiny hearing aids. “We’ll keep in touch with one another using these earbuds. They’re both earphones and mikes. They go deep in the ear and are pretty much undetectable unless someone gets very close.”

  Boyd examined his earpiece with disdain. “I knew a Broadway actor who wore one of these so someone offstage could read him his lines. Nobody in the audience knew about it, of course. The critics thought the long pauses in his performance provided profound dramatic impact. In fact, he was just waiting to hear his next line. The fraud won a Tony Award.”

  “That’s not what you’ll be using it for,” Nick said. “There’s no script and no lines to learn on this caper. Your job is to make the tour glamorous and entertaining for the viewer. So feel free to improvise, to find your character as you go.”

  “This is why I love working with you,” Boyd said. “You know how to treat actors. Speaking of that, you mentioned Joe’s trailer. What about mine?”

  “You don’t have one,” Kate said.

  “But I’m the star of the show,” Boyd said. “The star always gets a trailer.”

  “It’s a fake show,” she said.

  “Then I need a fake trailer.”

  “You’ll have to settle for an imaginary one,” Kate said.

  The next day, the film crew arrived at the Carter Grove estate at 9 A.M. in a convoy of cars, trucks, and vans led by Kate’s Ford Taurus. Dozens of people spilled out of the vehicles and swarmed over the property, lugging cables, monitors, director’s chairs, microphones, lights, and all kinds of other paraphernalia. It was a lot of commotion, which was what Nick wanted. He’d purposely hired far more people and brought in more equipment than was necessary so there would be plenty of activity to keep the security guards busy.

  Nick and Kate brought Boyd into the kitchen, where Carter Grove sat on a barstool having his makeup applied by a slim young woman.

  “Mr. Grove, I’d like to introduce you to Boyd Capwell,” Kate said. “Our new host this season.”

  Carter stood and Boyd offered him his hand. “This is a big thrill for me. I couldn’t possibly be more excited about this opportunity.”

  Nick led them outside, where he introduced Carter and Boyd to the two shaggy cameramen, each of whom carried a lightweight digital camera and looked as if he washed his hair with bacon grease.

  “We’re going to start here and go slowly through the house.” Nick turned to the cameramen. “Your job is to stay on Boyd and Mr. Grove and whatever they are reacting to.”

  The cameramen nodded.

  Nick turned to Carter. “Just do exactly what you did yesterday. Pretend the cameras aren’t here. We’ll try to keep ourselves and the crew out of your way, so we don’t end up in your line of vision. We want you to feel as if it’s just the two of you.”

  “I can do that,” Carter said.

  “Terrific,” Nick said. “Let’s make a TV show.”

  • • •

  The first room Carter took Boyd into was the Grand Salon with its domed skylight depicting the Roman gods. Boyd looked up at it while Carter told the story of the room pretty much word-for-word the way he had for Nick and Kate.

  “You must get some monster cobwebs up there,” Boyd said. “How do you get rid of them?”

  “I send some guys up on ladders once a month.”

  “I wouldn’t want your window cleaning bills.” Boyd tapped his foot on the floor. “Is this real marble?”

  “Imported from Italy. From Pietrasanta, to be precise, the same quarry where Michelangelo mined the stone he used to sculpt David.”

  “Did you know that they have linoleum at Home Depot that looks just like marble now? It’s much cheaper.”

  “It’s not the same,” Carter said, his eyes slightly narrowed.

  “That’s for sure,” Boyd said. “Good luck trying to sculpt David out of it.”

  Boyd laughed. Carter didn’t. Nick and Kate stood by the front door, far behind the cameramen.

  Kate leaned over to Nick and whispered, “What the hell is Boyd doing?”

  “He’s representing the audience by being the common man.”

  “The common man is pissing Carter off.”

  “It’s keeping Carter engaged and his attention focused on Boyd, which is what we want,” Nick said. “You do know that Boyd can hear you on his earbud, right?”

  “Of course I do,” Kate said, but that was a lie. She’d forgotten.

  “Carter is going to show Boyd his slot machine collection now,” Nick said. “This would be a good time for us to go to the theater. Joe, can you make us invisible?”

  “No problem,” Joe replied, his voice transmitted to their earbuds from where he sat in the construction trailer on the empty lot next door. “Just wait until Boyd and Carter make their move down the corridor to the game room.”

  Boyd took that as his cue to head toward one of the corridors off the foyer. “So where does this lead?”

  “To the Sands Hotel and Casino, circa 1962,” Carter said.

  “You’re kidding,” Boyd said. “This I’ve got to see.”

  “Follow me.” Carter walked past him down the hall. Boyd and the cameramen went after him. At the same moment, Nick and Kate slipped away down another hall that branched off the foyer.

  Nick had total faith that Joe, sitting out in the trailer, was tracking them and deftly replacing the live security camera feed with the footage he’d shot earlier of empty corridors and rooms.

  “This is fun,” Nick said, stopping in front of the theater’s ticket booth.

  “I’d be more comfortable doing this at night,” Kate said, “armed to the teeth, and wearing night vision goggles.”

  “You’d be more comfortable doing everything that way.”

  Nick and Kate slipped on disposable gloves, eased open the glass door to the theater, hurried past the concession stand, and stepped into the auditorium. The stage lights for filming were arranged on tall stands, but they hadn’t been powered up yet. Only the sconces were on.

  Nick ran his hands over the blank wall as if he were smoothing out wrinkles on a bedspread.

  “What are you doing?” Kate asked.

  “Trying to find a switch.”

  Nick looked at the sconces. He reached up and tugged on one of them. It held fast. He tried the other one. It turned, there was a click, and he stepped back just as the wall swung out toward them, releasing a burst of cool air from the room
beyond.

  “Voilà,” he said and stepped inside.

  Of course Kate knew they were looking for a secret door, but when the wall actually opened, she felt a childish thrill. She’d never actually seen a secret door before. It was like something out of Scooby-Doo. She half expected a cartoon mummy to come running out, arms outstretched, trailing a tattered strip of bandage behind him.

  Nick stopped on the first of two steps that led down into the room. Kate came up beside him and they stood there for a moment, getting the lay of the land.

  The walls were painted black and adorned with paintings illuminated by carefully positioned pinpoint halogens. Pedestals and glass cases with sculptures, pottery, masks, and jewels were arrayed throughout the space and lit from below and above for full dramatic effect. Benches upholstered with red velvet cushions were placed in key positions that offered the best views of the artwork and displays.

  Nick let his breath out slowly. “Holy crap.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “This isn’t just a secret room. It’s the secret room to end all secret rooms.”

  “It’s pretty nice, but it’s no Batcave.”

  “It’s better than the Batcave. You’re looking at the hall of fame of art thievery.” Nick began pointing to various paintings and objects. “That’s an Edgar Degas drawing, part of the haul from the Gardner Museum in 1990, the biggest art theft in U.S. history. Over there is a Picasso taken from the Museu da Chácara do Céu in Rio de Janeiro in 2006. And in that display case on your left is a rare Abraham-Louis Breguet clock stolen from a museum in Paris in 1981.”

  Kate pointed to a pedestal at the far end of the room. “And there’s the bronze rooster.”

  Nick reached into his breast pocket, took out what appeared to be a pair of sunglasses, and slipped them on. “Damn.”

  “What is it now?”

  He removed the glasses and handed them to her. “See for yourself.”

  Kate put them on and looked out at the room. The glasses allowed her to see beams of red light crisscrossing the room from floor to ceiling. The pattern of the lights shifted every few seconds. They’d never be able to get past them. And if any of the beams were broken, the alarms would go off.

  She took the glasses off and gave Nick a sidewise look. “I thought you said there wouldn’t be any security in here.”

  “I didn’t know about all of the extraordinary art treasures that Carter has or that he’s a generous patron of the greatest thieves on earth. If I’d known that, I would have done a lot of things differently.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “We need a distraction,” he said. “Obviously, Carter flipped the switch for those areas where the film crew would be operating but left some of his security in place. Let’s hope the roof is still wired for impact.”

  Kate put her hand in her pocket, found the tiny transmitter, and pressed the button.

  Both Joe and Boyd heard the conversation and knew what was coming. They’d been briefed on “the distraction.”

  Boyd was in the casino with the two cameramen and Carter. Carter was explaining that all of the 1960s light fixtures in the room were genuine.

  “Only the carpets from the Sands had to be re-created,” Carter said. “Everything else is authentic.”

  “Do you pay out slot winnings in 1960s dollars or have you adjusted for inflation?”

  Boyd slipped a nickel into a slot machine and pulled the lever. The wheels of fortune spun.

  Joe sat at a table in the trailer. In front of him were four computer monitors. The first screen showed live video feeds from every camera on Carter Grove’s property. The middle screen showed thumbnails of all the prerecorded footage that Joe had on tape. And the third screen showed him what the security guards were seeing on their monitors in the command center.

  He clicked his mouse and enlarged the video feed from the surveillance cameras that covered the beach side of Carter’s estate. He could see a speedboat cruising across the water, pulling a man through the air on a parasail. Suddenly the line to the boat snapped loose and the freed parasailer began a rapid descent toward Carter’s estate.

  In the casino, Boyd rolled cherries on all three reels of a slot machine. Bells rang, and coins spilled into the metal tray with a loud clatter. Boyd let out a whoop, and Carter Grove clenched his teeth hard enough to give himself a headache.

  “Do I get to keep this?” Boyd asked.

  The jackpot was pure luck, but what happened next was planned with precision. Jake O’Hare landed on the roof of Carter Grove’s mansion, setting off alarms that were so loud they shook the building.

  The instant the alarms blared, Nick and Kate made a mad dash across the floor of the secret room to the rooster. Nick lifted the rooster carefully from its pedestal and handed it to her.

  “Take this,” he said. “I need my hands free to grab the Degas and that Rembrandt over there.”

  “This isn’t a buffet. We came for the rooster, that’s all we’re taking.”

  “Everything in here is stolen. That Rembrandt alone is worth much more than this rooster. We can’t just walk away from all this.”

  Kate understood his temptation. She felt it too, only it wasn’t the urge to steal that she was fighting. She wanted to immediately arrest Carter Grove for aiding and abetting the theft of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art treasures. But since she’d discovered the crime while searching the house without a warrant, and in the company of an international fugitive she was supposed to be chasing, she’d be the one sent to prison, not Carter.

  “We have to go now,” she said, “before the alarm stops ringing and we get caught down here. And if you take anything other than the rooster I’ll personally shoot you as soon as I lay my hands on my gun.”

  “It’s a crime leaving all of that behind,” Nick said.

  “You and I have fundamentally different ideas about crime.”

  “That’s the story of our lives.”

  Carter abandoned Boyd and the film crew and ran straight for the command center. The militaristic-looking young BlackRhino operative manning the console stood up as soon as Carter entered.

  “What have we got?” Carter demanded.

  The operative pointed to the monitors. “There’s an old guy on the roof.”

  “What the hell?” Carter pushed the operative aside and looked for himself. Sure enough, there was an old guy in a bright yellow life vest up there. He was all tangled up in the rigging of a parasail and trying to get free.

  “I don’t believe this,” Carter said. “Where did he come from?”

  “He broke loose from a parasailing boat. There is a water sports outfit that runs them.”

  “Damn tourists. Get someone up on the roof to bring him down,” Carter said. “And turn off the alarm.”

  “Yes, sir,” the operative said. He flicked a switch and the alarm stopped ringing.

  Carter turned around to see Boyd and the cameramen standing behind him. Boyd clutched a vintage plastic Sands bucket full of coins.

  “Cut!” Carter said, waving his hands at the cameramen. “This isn’t part of the tour.”

  “But it adds so much excitement to the show,” Boyd said.

  “Stay here,” Carter said. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready to shoot again.”

  Back in the theater, Kate straightened the sconce, closing the doorway to the secret room, while Nick went to a metal equipment case that was beside one of the lighting stands. He opened the case, gently placed the rooster inside, and closed it. Then the two of them walked out of the theater and peeled off their gloves.

  Kate didn’t like leaving the rooster, but it was too risky to try taking it with them now. They’d retrieve the case when the tour was finished and the crew packed up. At that point, carrying an equipment case out of the building wouldn’t attract attention.

  “We’re clear,” Kate said, notifying Boyd and Joe.

  It took ten minutes for Carter’s guards to find a lad
der, set it up in the yard, and climb to the roof. Jake stood and held out a disposable camera to the first man who showed up.

  “You’ve got to take a picture of me,” Jake said. “Or my wife will never believe this.”

  Nick and Kate joined Carter, Veronica, and a handful of BlackRhino operatives in the yard to meet the uninvited guest. Jake came slowly down the ladder, holding on to it for dear life as he went along. His bright yellow life vest was open now and showed the white IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN FLORIDA T-shirt he wore underneath. He had on a pair of Bermuda shorts, white tube socks, and running shoes that closed with Velcro straps. Sunblock was smeared heavily on his nose. Once his feet touched solid ground, Jake turned to the gathered crowd with a big smile.

  “Woo-wee, what a wild ride that was. Sure got my fifty bucks’ worth.”

  Carter stepped up to him. “Who are you?”

  “J. W. Saltz from Baxter Springs, Kansas. I own the Chevy dealership in town. Come by and I’ll make you the deal of a century on the Impala of your dreams.”

  It was hard for Kate not to laugh.

  Jake shaded his eyes with his hand and scanned the ocean. “Looks like Pedro headed back to Cuba after my line broke. Can’t really blame him. He probably thinks I’m tangled in a tree with a broken neck. Hell, I’m surprised I’m not. I’ve never steered a parachute before. I just pulled this and pulled that and made a bunch of promises to God that I hope he doesn’t expect me to keep.”

  “What are you doing down here?”

  “Thirty-seventh wedding anniversary. My wife wanted to browse at the consignment stores, so I dropped her off and went to the beach. She loves those stores. Lots of filthy-rich old people die down here and that’s where their stuff ends up, dirt cheap. Nobody at home knows Myrtle is wearing a dead lady’s clothes. They think we’re loaded.”

  “I meant, why were you parasailing in front of my house?”